Ron takes another step in his journey

The kids gathered around Ron Anderson on Friday night in the south end zone of A.J. McClung Memorial Stadium.

But this was no football game. It was no game at all.

Anderson, about 30 hours removed from his second chemotherapy treatment in the current round, sat in a wheelchair. The half dozen kids, mostly girls, were on stilts and towered over him.

This was the perfect place and time for a life lesson — and Anderson is not one to miss pointing out such moments. He has been doing it for more nearly four decades.

Almost everyone in the stadium, and there were hundreds, had been impacted directly or indirectly by cancer. The Muscogee County Relay for Life sponsored by the American Cancer Society was their outlet on this muggy night.

The girls rocked back and forth on the stilts, holding hands for balance, as they prepared to walk a lap around the stadium in Anderson’s honor. They were all members of the Springer Theater Academy, a program that Anderson helped start and ran until early last year.

Anderson thanked the students for giving up their Friday night to support a worthy cause, something bigger than them.

“There are things worth fighting against,” he told the children, mostly teenagers. “You fight against prejudice. You fight against bias. There are things on the outside you fight, and cancer and chemotherapy are two of those things.”

But that wasn’t Anderson’s only point. He talked about the struggle and fight within.

“The biggest fight is on the inside,” he told them. “Once you win that fight, all the other fights are easy.”

That’s a life lesson we could all use. And the timing was perfect.

When Anderson got through talking to the students, he lined up with the other cancer survivors, more than 200 of them, and prepared to make the nearly 400-yard walk around the edge of the field.

Part of his medical team at the John B. Amos Cancer Center saw him waiting to start and came over to wish him well and give him hugs. Just a day earlier they had been pumping poison into his body in an attempt to kill the cancer. Now they were telling him he’s got this as he prepared to do his lap.

This round of chemotherapy has come with great fatigue. His legs feel like dead weight most of the time. That didn’t matter when it came to time to do the survivors walk. Anderson got out of the wheelchair, struggled a little with his balance and just started walking.

That is pretty much what he has been doing since October 2014 when he was diagnosed and doctors said it was Stage 4.

He just stands up and keeps walking, focused on his family, wife Debbie and son Max. And he does it by taking one step after another.

The steps on that football field didn’t come easy on Friday night. But he was surrounded by people who know and understand the fight in ways that those of us who have not been in it never will.

That was the beauty of Friday night. The struggle and fight are often within, but if you look around you there are others in the same struggle. There are others walking with the same determination and purpose.

In the middle of a life-and-death battle, there are certainly things worth fighting for. Even if that fight means you struggle to get out of bed, get to your feet, get to the football stadium and walk.

Just walk despite the struggle, despite the pain, despite the obstacles.

And there were a lot of local heroes on that field walking alongside Anderson.

This story was originally published May 2, 2016 at 6:39 PM with the headline "Ron takes another step in his journey."